This paper studies the role of intrinsic motivation, reputation and reciprocity in driving open source software innovation. We exploit the observed pattern of contributions - the 'revealed preference' of developers - to infer the underlying incentives. Using detailed information on code...

This paper presents a simple model for analysing the contribution of investments in physical and institutional infrastructure to the transition process. In addition to the direct cost savings, infrastructure investment generates important indirect effects, or transition impacts. The model shows...

We study how the market for innovation affects enforcement of patent rights. Conventional wisdom associates the gains from trade with comparative advantage in manufacturing or marketing. We show that these gains imply that patent transactions should increase litigation risk. We identify a new...

Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede such follow-on innovation? This paper studies the effect of removing patent protection through court invalidation on the subsequent research related to the focal patent, as measured by later citations. We...

We analyse the determinants of the decline in measured research productivity (the patent/R&D ratio) using panel data on manufacturing firms in the US for the period 1980-93. We focus on three factors: the level of demand, the quality of patents, and technological exhaustion. We first develop an...

Support for many R&D and technology policies relies on empirical evidence that R&D ‘spills over’ between firms. But there are two countervailing R&D spillovers: positive effects from technology spillovers and negative effects from business stealing by product market rivals. We develop a...

We study the impact of incentive pay, local development objectives and government constraints on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model of technology licensing offices, using new survey information together with panel data on U.S. universities for...